Is this thing on?

I am interested in the concept of employee ownership, and early on while working for Opera I set a goal of a 1/1000 ownership. I never quite reached that goal, the rest of the world has more money than I do and I have not been willing to borrow money to invest in shares, but still I am more economically exposed to the fortunes of Opera Software than anything else I own. So when Opera posted excellent results, the market reaction made me more paper money in a day than I can expect to make in real money in this year. ;cheers: I'd say.

This 17% rise in a single day and a similar fall earlier when a disappointing result was posted is fair enough, this can be seen as a reaction to real performance by Opera, but most share price movements have not been a result of changes in Opera's profitabilities or potential. My experience of Opera Software is as a serious longterm company, my experience of Oslo Stock Exchange (OSE), where Opera is listed, is the very opposite. OSE has had a terrible reputation in the past, and there is no indication that it is any better in the present. In my view OSE has been, is, and will be gamed, and there is not much to lead you to believe that the Norwegian government will apply the same rules of transparency to it as it does to itself. OSE is no more trustworthy than most emerging market bourses.

As an Opera employee I reflected that it was probably possible to make (or lose) more money on short-trading the Opera stock than what it would be as an employee. Due to insider trader consideration short term trading was inconvenient to say the least, but it was pretty obvious that the market had little understanding of the consequences of an event, reacting strongly to an inconsequential event and ignoring an important one. It was also a useful lesson in why not to invest in the company you are working for, not so much due to spreading risk as due to the delay in buyng/selling stock.

I could go into trading, at least on a hobby basis. Two things hold me back, high transaction costs and a distrust of OSE. That said, longer term fundamentals always matter, some of the time.

Now that Opera is feeling free, inevitably the question of open source comes up. There is nothing wrong with open source, even if I sometimes wonder about some of its evangelists, but still we have opted for having the Opera source code closed.

Could Opera benefit from being open source? Yes. Does it benefit from not being open source? Yes. To us the benefits from being open source are small, the benefits from not being open source large. For other products, maybe one of ours if we had any, the bottom line might be different. This is a commercial decision and not one of ideology. Maybe we are netheads with a cause but fundamentally we are in it for the money, and not to promote purity of thought. If we don't make money from producing a browser, we will do something else.

One reason an open source Opera wouldn't be such a good idea is that there are already two healthy open source browser projects out there, based on the Gecko and KHTML layout engines, and three would be a crowd. If we all were the same browser under different names, there would be no variety or competition left except for the respective marketing departments. It is real, open competition we need (something that has been hard to get on the Windows platform).

Open competition depends on fair business practices and open standards, that in turn spurs innovation and variety. I prefer Opera, you might go for Konqueror, while your uncle might not even realize that it is a browser he's using. Competition comes with gains and losses. As time goes by you can expect Opera to take some users from Firefox and Firefox from Opera, but as we are different neither would kill off the other. One might end up the majority browser and the other a minority browser, but there is no reason we will be worse off than now and we are already doing good.

I can't say who is going to end up on top: we, Mozilla, Konqueror, or some browser yet to come. Hey, maybe a standards compliant IE? Of course it would be nice for us to have the biggest slice of the pie, but realistically the top browser has changed several times in the past and is going change several more times in the future. As long as that top browser speaks the same language as the rest there will not be another Netscape vs IE vendor lock-in. The browsers may have different features and strong points, but the promise is that if something looks good and behaves nicely in one of Opera, Mozilla/Firefox, or Konqueror/Safari, it will do so in the others too. Then you can make your choice of browser solely on which one you prefer, not on which part of the web you are dependent on.


One of my concerns with removing the banner is that having a free Opera for desktop could make it appear like free as in cheap. Unsurprisingly many pundits, including Daniel Glazman, believe that the desktop browser is just a lossleader for devices. That is forgetting that Opera for desktop is profitable, now more than before, and I expect it to be much more profitable in the future.

True, we are only earning half as much on desktop than we are on devices, and by losing the banner we have momentarily taken half away of that again, but the cost of producing a desktop browser is also so much lower. There are only three substantial desktop platforms left in the world, Mac, Linux, and Windows, and they are so alike it is hard for a non-expert to tell them apart. Devices on the other hand are all different to each other almost for the sake of being different, and practically all of our platform-specific efforts lies in adapting to that array of disparate devices. Relatively speaking making a desktop browser is easy money.

As the banner waves us goodbye we should recognize that it has had its days, and it has served us well. Before it arrived in December 2000 we shut out all users that hadn't paid up after a month of real use (except for the opera.com web site, so if you never leave the My Opera community you might never have realised the lock had changed).

We got a small core of paying users that way, but this was too exclusive for an ambitious browser that was going places. As Opera was freed with Opera 5.0, the number of users exploded. The banner itself gave us next to nothing at the nadir, but our paying users did and with many more were exposed to Opera we got all the more users supporting us so we could develop a better browser. In time the banner too turned profitable, and advertising's promise of something for nothing is appealing, but like the licence model before it it has been holding us back. The banner may be missed, but there is no time for nostalgia, we have an IE market share to decimate.